 |
|
Page 2
 |
 |
At the center of the Auroville is the golden Matrimandir (above). Most
residents live in suburban-style, single-family homes, but a new
development called Samasti (below) contains attached units.
|
|
|
 |
|
|
This has interesting ramifications. One of the scintillations of Auroville
is its resistance to leadership. Indeed, in the postcharismatic era following
the death of the Mother, the difficulties of consensus (most of the
governance and day-to-day operation is managed by resident "working
groups") and of unconventional property relations (no private ownership)
have led to a certain amount of strife and, some years ago, to government
intervention. The sense of drift has also kept the population low. Of the
1,500 "members," a third are from India and the rest from abroad.
It's also an inspirational place. Environmentally it is particularly impressive,
with its thousands of trees, its organic farming, its use of alternative
energy and appropriate building technologies. There is also much goodwill
and accomplishment in dealing with what is perhaps the central contradiction
of Auroville: the 13 existing villages within or adjoining it and the 40
within its self-identified bioregion. Aurovillians have made substantial
contributions toward the educational, health, and sanitation needs of these
villagers. However, the class organization is clear: of the 4,000 villagers
employed in Auroville, the majority are servants, guards, and laborers.
But ironically the urban character of Auroville is largely the product of
the organization and growth of these indigenous villages. Sites of commerce,
the little villages provide a sense of the street that is almost completely
lacking in the planned elements of Auroville. At present, these are made
up of about 80 individual communities--with names like Quiet, Aspiration,
Felicity, Petite Ferme, Gaia, Siddhartha, and Repos--some residential and
others supporting the town's "commercial units," which include
agricultural and handicrafts production, small electronic and engineering
concerns, alternative therapies, what is surely the highest per-capita population
of architects in India, and a variety of quotidian services.
|
|
 |
The exterior of the Centre for Further Learning.
|
|
|
 |
The Pyramids, where art classes are taught.
|
There is an initially invisible character to this organization. The major
portion of Aurovillians live in individual houses--many of them architecturally
remarkable--which are dispersed under the trees throughout the town's territory
and linked by a tangle of roads and paths: the standard means of movement
is the motorbike. This suburban texture--institutionalized in a 100-foot
minimum separation of houses--is an object of disquiet to many Aurovillian
architects; for them it represents both a failure of collectivity and an
unsustainable settlement pattern.
Indeed there is still a constituency for the original megastructures, and
one group of architects--led by Canadian expat Dominic Dube--is working
to produce a green version of a Corbusian Unité D'Habitation on the
site of one of the original galactic arms. More modestly, architect Ajit
Koujalgi has designed a beautiful meandering cluster of attached houses--called
Samasti--originally planned for 40 units and built at 15. Koujalgi argues
for this increase in density on both social and environmental grounds. Given
the current low growth rates, it is hard to predict the outcome of this
argument, save to say that it is both real and important.
Auroville is situated on the outskirts of Pondicherry, a French colonial
town that is in many ways its urbanistic opposite. The French arrived in
the late seventeenth century, and Pondicherry, or "Pondy," became
the base from which they attempted to dislodge the British from India. A
British naval bombardment leveled the town in 1761, obliging reconstruction.
The core "white town" that resulted--behind beachfront ramparts
and surrounded by a canal--is a genteel grid of streets lined with elegant
villa-style structures, many decayed, many restored, many with interior
gardens.
|
|
 |
With its high-density vernacular architecture, nearby Pondicherry is
Auroville's polar opposite (a typical street, above).
|
The Mother's decision to create a new city, turning away from the messy
gentility and vitality of traditional town life, reflects the same
impulse of that of her rough contemporary Le Corbusier, another renouncing
cosmopolite. Dismayed by what he saw as the powerful disorderliness of the
peerless city of Paris, Corb's fantasies turned to the megapastoral, those
Cartesian cities of slabs in an endless verdant plain. Sacrificed were
both the life of the street and the expression of difference--all lost in
a standardizing vision of equality, the rationalist's version of the spiritual.
It is a vision that in many ways reacts to oppressive differentiation of
the colonial city and its negative regard for anything other.
Today's equivalent may be Bangalore, the capital of the "Silicon Valley
of India." I passed through on my recent trip to see what form this
utopia was taking. Although I had a good tour of a number of the familiar-looking
high-tech campus environments of the local and global software industries,
there was no special revelation here other than further signs of the Indian
genius for code-writing and their skilled entry into the global electronic
marketplace. More interesting than this familiar production infrastructure
was a larger set of connections and mergings, ranging from the Java and
HTML manuals spread next to the romance novels for sale on the sidewalk,
to storefront computer schools, to architects with side businesses doing
overnight AutoCAD for American firms. India is not simply aping global
patterns but constructing an alternative modernity.
|
|
 |
New Oroville:
Built on a rational plan (above) by a Seattle-based software company
for its employees in Bangalore (the Indian equivalent of Silicon
Valley), this planned community is made up of concrete domes (below)
that can be configured into homes or workspaces.
|
|
|
 |
Photos: Courtesy Sheridan Pinder
|
But there was one place I found captivatingly over the top. At an IT trade
fair in Hyderabad I passed the booth of Catalytic Software, a Seattle-based
corporation founded by a pair of Microsoft refugees. With a substantial
India-based operation, Catalytic has decided to build a company town--that
most American style of utopia--adjoining a new high-tech park. And so the
town of New Oroville--named with pure serendipity after the Washington State
hometown of the company's two founders--has begun to rise.
New Oroville, a 500-acre "branded community offering a coveted international
lifestyle," is ultimately to provide housing, production, community,
and recreational facilities for 12,000 to 15,000 employees and family members.
The entire village is being constructed of spray-formed monolithic concrete
domes. Organized as apartments, houses, and workspaces, each will include
abundant modern technology as well as a private back garden. Individually
the domes (of which a first few have been built) are nifty. In aggregate
they're likely to look like a tank farm, especially given the dogmatic gridded
layout of the community.
Catalytic, however, seems to have been meticulous in its plans for providing
transport, recreation (including an ice-hockey dome and three cricket ovals),
waste and energy management, and retail services. The plan has also been
carefully vetted for its conformity to Vin India, at radically lower
cost.
As a diagram New Oroville is both similar to and radically different than
Auroville. Both share a centralized plan, a greenbelt, a technological and
environmental sensibility, and a sense of mission. Both raise problematic
issues of democracy and governance. Both are "foreign" growths
on the body of India. Both see the form of the city as a medium of both
contentment and abstraction. Both use domes as forceful symbols of progress
and enlightenment. Both are utopian. Both are the product of individual
vision. But they're not the same, of course. Utopia is a fantasy realized
on a field of nature, and is always about property and conformity.
An intentional community is the translation of utopia into action--the place
the rubber hits the road. I love India for its fearless utopianism, for
its willingness to absorb and modify models with the most spacious (and
suspect) pedigrees. In their uncertain opposition Auroville and New Oroville
demonstrate the absolute genius of the place.
|
|
|
BACK TO TOP
